Friday, May 16, 2008

Playing the Blues

Last night my second youngest sister, Smashley, brought her new boyfriend, Brett, over for his first family dinner. Due to circumstances, both my older sister and my youngest sister couldn't make it, but my brother and I both did.

We have known this guy for years, so it was only slightly strained, as all first dinners with the new boyfriend tend to be. My mom politely asked questions and honestly, after about 15 minutes, everyone was pretty comfortable.

Brett is...how do I put this...every mothers dream? He is polite, pretty much a genius, an engineer, oh and in three days he is going to go do volunteer work in Africa. All I'm saying is that if boyfriend/girlfriends were chosen based on their resumes, Brett would be a shoe-in.

Thankfully they aren't, because I would have definitely not made the first screening. I would, without a doubt, have been doomed to life as the crazy single lady with 32 cats.

But let's get back on back on track, shall we? Somehow the subject of playing guitar came up, and my mom asked Brett if he plays the guitar. He does.

And the cello.

And the piano.

And the drums.

"Is that all?" My mom asked. I just started to laugh. "What Mom? That's not enough to compete with the musical prodigies your children turned out to be?" I asked her.

She said laughed and said "no, all five of you were failures!". Its true. We even went through a brief checklist of the lessons to which she had to cart us back and forth.

There was Emily and the piano, Ashley with the clarinet and the violin, Bethany with the violin and french horn, Everett with the trumpet and the bass guitar, and then there was me.

Me vs. the alto saxophone.

My nemesis. I despised practicing. I just wanted to pick it up and play. I knew it was in me somewhere. I knew that if I could just tap into my inner self, my deeply emotional inner self(what?), the music would flow out of me.

But after about two months of lessons, I refused to practice. I would go to lessons, lie and say "Oh yes Mr. Sipe, I practice for 30 minutes every single day."

He must have believed me, because one day he took my mom aside to ask her some questions, about why I was struggling to master the simplest things even though I practiced so much. Eventually he came to the root of his question.

"Does Rebekah have a learning disability that I should know about?"

And that, my friends, was the end of my musical career. If you have been reading these inane little rambling of mine, you may remember this one, where I confessed my secret fear. Mr. Sipe pushed me one step closer to believing it might be true.